Libation
by Mithrigil
Summary: [III and IV] On the run from the law, Albert stops at an island hermitage to pick up a few things that belonged to his family, and pay his respects...


**Libation**

**_a brief foray into Genso Suikoden III (by way of Genso Suikoden IV)_**

_by Mithrigil Galtirglin_

_the year In Solis 478, on the heels of the Second Fire-Bringer War_

* * *

"Go ahead, Yuber."

Before the ferryman could finish mooring the boat, unpretentious silver blades snicked through his spine at his neck and waist. He hit the beach in three pieces. His pole fell across him and splashed in the dune-full of blood, then rolled down his recumbent back into the gap left between his head and shoulders.

Albert sighed, and stepped onto the beach, skirting the corpse and his rapidly pooling blood even as the late afternoon's eager tide began to subsume it. "I'm impressed you waited that long," he told the Demon. Albert had spent the entire boat-trip watching his black-clad companion's rarely-displayed gestures of discomfort emerge one at a time--his shoulders rose and fell when he breathed, his fingers curled and uncurled against his thighs, his repartee with Albert ceased in favor of Yuber staring disgustedly at the island on the horizon. It was usually the case that a killing or two allayed whatever dangers boredom set upon Yuber's mind.

"Good," Yuber said, and sheathed his blades. He turned in a slow circle--crushing the ferryman's left hand under his black heel--and snorted in disgust at the island's landscape. "Now I know where the damned nest is."

There had once been a dock, but the ferryman's last words had been a complaint about the decay it had fallen into. The remaining pillars and fallen planks of wood were largely a deep green, with the occasional dry whiteness of dead sea-creatures or living fungus. The ropes were frayed and dangled almost to the vacillating surface of the ocean, long since mistaken by base fish for sustenance. What was left of the docks tapered off into a cobble-cairned pathway, modulating between sand and dirt until a clear-cut but rough-edged track congealed where it had been most trod.

The path led past the dense, cancerous foliage toward what could pass for a gorge. Vines climbed up the red rock much the same way the mold on the dock did, but the path veered sharply to the right and Albert couldn't see beyond the turn. The long shadows of the trees and cliffs reached toward where Albert assumed the hermitage would be.

The shadows nearest him stretched as Yuber surrounded himself ankle-high with a pool of green light, preparing to teleport away.

Albert tried not to look down at the dead man as he turned back to the Demon. "Where are you going?"

"You care?" the Demon asked, his gold braid drifting back in the spell's wind.

"Go back to the Pirates' Nest, win us some renown," the strategist said, ignoring the Demon's low-browed glare.

Yuber shrugged and very nearly rolled his mismatched eyes. "Good a place as any," he muttered, and raised a foot to back into the portal. It caught on some of the ferryman's blood-caked hair, so Yuber kicked the head aside, snapping its nose.

"Come back in a day or so," Albert quickly ordered, masking the discomfort in his stomach with the curtness in his voice.

Yuber scoffed. "And if I don't?"

"You will."

With what might have been a nod in less capricious lighting, the Demon sank through the portal, his golden braid like a lightening blot behind him. The spell ceased and its light compressed with a faint sucking sound, barely audible above the gurgling waves.

Albert left the ferryman's pieces as they were, but stooped briefly to check that the boat was secure. To be sure, this island would benefit from the ghost stories, and the monsters smelling blood might be inclined to let the living be. Still a bit sickened at the facility with which he had allowed Yuber to kill the layman, Albert retied his scarf, put his hands in his pockets, and set off down the path.

The sounds of the island, he assessed, would quickly render him mad. There was little wind, especially compared to the forces over the sea, and there were few fowl overhead. In the silent, dry brush and the faded moss that climbed the red rock-faces, Albert could see the insects lurking, going about their rounds without acknowledging the human in their midst. He could hear their gentle buzzing over his own crackling footsteps, heavy on the gravel- and twig-strewn dirt. He allowed himself a sigh and reached up to brush his wine-red bangs out of his eyes, just as he turned past the bend in the path he'd not been able to see beyond earlier.

His very first thought about the hermitage was that these were _not_ fitting living conditions for a Silverberg, even a wayward one. He had thought that Mathiu's historic abode in Seika was bad enough, small and homely and good for little more than deception; but the moment Albert laid eyes on the half-fenced shanty that barely passed for a _home,_ let alone one of a great and tragic woman, a disgust raced through his insides, even deeper than it had been when Yuber unceremoniously butchered that ferryman.

Albert kicked the gate open--or tried to, as it screeched to a halt on its hinges before it even escaped the span of its own shadow--then groaned and leaned his shoulder into the splintering planks. It took a fair amount of force for the scraping door to allow him through, and even then its base held staunchly against the cluster of dead grass and chipped dirt pooling on its far side. Albert held his stomach and coat in, slinking sideways through the meager break in the gate with grit teeth. He left it open.

The yard was barren and empty even of foliage--the stumps of two thin trees and the stones that marked a pair of erstwhile herb-gardens were all that passed for living between the fence and the house. There was a small, rust-ensconced water pump off to the yard's edge, and two windows, the glare from the afternoon sun revealing drawn curtains on the other side of their glass. A pool of shingles had toppled off the roof to land between the pump and the rectangle of stones nearest it, and thin straws poked out of the crackled mortar where that corner of the roof had been.

How long _had_ it been, Albert wondered. Surely he could not be the first to unveil her memorial.

With a last glance over his shoulder at the rock-framed path, a foreboding orange in the waning light, Albert approached the door. For the sake of propriety alone, he raised a gloved fist to knock. Apparently the door suffered from the opposite of the gate's malaise, and swung open, slow and squealing, almost before Albert could rap his knuckles on the door a second time.

It was, as Albert had suspected, a one-room shack that had once been a two-room shack. The track for the divider was off to his right, and the divider itself had long been removed and leaned, folded, against the back wall. The walls had once been painted, a somber beige that revealed itself in misshapen patches in the darkest corners of the room. To his left there was a moth-eaten and stained futon half-hidden behind a frayed lavender curtain, the withered ivory down from a missing pillow strewn haphazardly in a trail toward a gaping hole beside the wide-open back door.

There was a small black stove near the bed--no doubt nights were cold here--though the crate beside it was devoid of coal. The stove's pipe might well have been supporting that corner of the room. There was also a small fireplace toward the center of the back wall, with a shelf over it, covered in as much dust as knicknacks. Albert was surprised that the tokens had not been taken away, or at least knocked over, but the shelf was rather high.

Far to his right was what he'd primarily come here for--a locked armoire with glass panes, full to the brim with books. It loomed over a weathered desk, which bore in addition to a leather writing-mat and apparently serviceable jar of ink and shaker of salt, an empty square and jewel-cut bottle, with its cork beside it. Between the desk and the bookcase were several crates, which--once Albert had gotten there to open them--were home to several paper-cushioned bottles of dark Kanakan wine, all corked and unopened and _quite_ old.

Albert shook the dust off his hands and pulled one of the bottles from the crate. His gloves were turning a greyish-brown, which made him wince, but he reasoned he'd be dealing with worse than laundry on this island, what with Yuber's obvious aversion to the place and the impending threat of chirping insects. He set the bottle on the desk, and pried open the desk's drawer, assuming there would be a key to the bookshelf.

The lack of rattling from the drawer as it opened conveyed the contrary. The drawer had nothing in it but more dust--of course--and a leatherbound book about the size of Albert's palm. Thinking the key might be pressed between the pages, he opened it, but after fanning through the pages he found most of the vellum blank. The first page, as he turned back to it, was lettered thickly, in a left-leaning and disjointed cursive.

_**.e.S.m.**_

_**IS 249 - IS 305, if this book is not returned for.**_

**_History will, perhaps, account for me._**

Under that, in significantly thinner, younger handwriting, it read:

_IS 249 - IS 306, upon the rising of the third moon,_

_at the site of the last battle,_

_as a hero to the Island Federation in both life and death._

_Those who wish to pay their respects may do so at her memorial,_

_deeper in the heart of this island._

_Prince Lazlo en Kuldes of the Kingdom of Obel, IS 306_

"Well then," Albert mused, setting the book back in the drawer and closing it. With one hand he shut the drawer again, with the other he picked up the bottle of wine. He glanced around for an uncorking implement and, finding none nearby, approached the shelf over the hearth.

The shelf turned out to be as high as his lowest ribs, and he had to stoop a bit to blow the dust off the items. An ashtray, markedly free of tobacco even before the dust coating it was dispersed; a small vase, in which the flowers were quite emphatically dead; a series of gold-framed ink-drawn and partially colored portraits of red-haired and scarved individuals. Albert recognized the first of these as his ancestor Reginald and (presumably) his wife, the second as their son Colin (who had been assassinated), and the third as the other son, whose name was of little import. The fourth picture, farthest to the left, was newer, framed and drawn in a different style, no doubt as a tribute of sorts.

Though the drawing was only in black, white, and smudges of red, it was sparsely shaded at harsh angles. Elenor's face was smirking and somewhat haggard, her eyes dark and eyebrows curved sharply as the bend in the path outside. Her cheeks were very thin and unshaded at the edges, too close to the bone to wrinkle. Her hair--_absolutely beautiful_ were the first words to come to Albert's mind, though he didn't know if he was thinking of the craftsmanship or the subject--fell over the creases in her forehead in shallow curls, the longer ones pulled around the back of her head and tied with a wide ribbon. Her hair and eyebrows were overlaid with red ink, though only in hints and shadows. It drove Albert to lean back from the drawing and squint at the frame, trying to spread the tone to get a better idea of the color. It was an honest rendition, he fancied, taking in the sour expression that seemed to pronounce itself more and more each time he squinted at it.

He set the frame back on the shelf. The key to the bookshelf wasn't there either, and he inferred that it might be best to check the memorial, 'deeper in the heart of the island', the prince had written. With a sigh, Albert sidled out the back door of the house and took the bottle of wine with him.

The gorge-or-pathway, here, was much the same as it had been coming from the dock, but darker now that the sun was beginning to set and the insects to chirp. Almost strangling the neck of the bottle as he walked, he closed his eyes and tried to drown out the frittenancy. It was soft enough now that it only took a few trivial calculations to divert his ears. Five days at sea to get to the Pirate's Nest, meant three hundred miles, meant that he would have to wait for the Kamandohl fans to make it down from the continent in order to get a ship to do what he needed it to--

He'd come to the mouth of a cave of deep grey stone, almost out-of place with the red earth under his feet. He glanced around and, finding no other paths but noting the descent of the sun, he brushed aside some hanging tendrils of moss and walked briskly into the cave.

Of course the light waned, but the cavern was rather straightforward and there seemed to be a few breaches overhead in the stone that prevented the hollow from descending into pitch-blackness. There was very little gravel underfoot, especially compared to how it had been outside, and--much to Albert's relief--no insects. And the trek was uneventful as he found that, indeed, 'deeper in the heart of the island' merely meant 'twenty yards into a cave'.

The shrine--memorial--was a small pedestal of gold-plated steel on stone supports. Atop it was carved something markedly similar to what Elenor herself had written in the small book:

**ELENOR MAURA SILVERBERG**

**IS 249 - IS 306**

**Tenki**

With a slight flick of his eyebrow at the letters of 'Tenki', Albert also took note of the much more familiar symbol perched free beside the letters. It was a Silverberg crest in an archaic handsbreadth-form, a good deal larger than the one Albert wore chained to his left wrist. The white eye in the raised silver frame stared back at Albert, glinting out of the shadow of the red words carved underneath it: _I will either find a way or make one._ Before he was entirely aware what he was doing he'd reached down and taken it, in the hand that didn't hold the wine. There was something frightening and pleasantly cold running through him, a sanctity akin to turning that first page of Julian's white journal itself, five years ago in Harmonia.

He stretched out the arm cradling the wine bottle and shook his bracelet out through the sleeve of his coat and sweater. The bottle was a bit unwieldy and heavy, but he managed to turn his wrist up to balance the smaller silver crest on it and compare it to the larger, silver-threaded gold one. It was only then that he noticed that the larger crest was also a box, by the small groove in its side. He uncapped it, awkwardly pinning the wine bottle to his hip. The key was, as he suspected, jostled into a corner of the box, its neck wedged into the seam.

Albert knelt then, and set the crest aside. He shook his sleeve back into place on his way back to a stand, and held the bottle of wine in both hands.

"I apologize if this fails to be dignified," he said, and, wincing, attempted to pry the cork out of the bottle.

Perhaps it was how dirty and worn his gloves were getting, or perhaps he had been rendered hardier in these months at sea, but he actually managed to uncork the bottle. The smell of the wine raced out of the bottle's neck and Albert almost had to step back, it was such a force. He held the bottle at arm's length and poured, and the wine, pungent and surprisingly viscous, flowed through the carved letters of the memorial.

"Don't misinterpret," Albert continued. "I actually am getting you drunk and robbing you blind." He smiled a touch at his own humor and righted the bottle, leaving it about half-full, and then toasted toward the roof of the cave. "I will solemnize you and pass on your knowledge, where it has heretofore lain forgotten, as a testimony to the credit you have done to our name. Rest, honored Elenor," he concluded, "here beyond the confines of your bones." That said, he drank, with a thought to her actual 'grave', the ruins of El-Eal he had visited in the weeks prior, and another thought to the portrait over her hearth.

The wine was debilitatingly dry, possessing nothing of the sweetness it had conveyed when the bottle was open. It was so sharp that if Albert had decided to drink deeply rather than sip, he might have gagged, and that would have been more base than prying the cork out with his hands. He took only the one long sip, then turned away and left the memorial behind, taking the box-crest and key.

Once he returned to the cabin--just in time to watch the sun initiate its proper retreat behind the trees and gorge walls--he set the crest and bottle down on Elenor's desk and unlocked the bookcase. The smell of the leather and vellum was even more potent than the wine, and twice as pleasant. As he suspected, the volumes were well-organized, and he found her journals very quickly among the rest. Many of the books he already owned copies of--and a book's contents were a good deal more important than its edition--but those he did not have, well, now he did, and the thrill of it curled through his chest like summer vines.

He carried the most precious of these, Elenor's own journals, back to the desk with him, and swiped a wine glass along the way. He would have to drink that bottle properly before the air had its way with its contents, he reasoned as he sat and opened the first of the books, pouring the first quick glass of his great-great-great-aunt's Kanakan Red.

Hours passed, and a lantern was lit. She turned out not to be an incredible diarist, but Albert had to admit to losing himself in her acrid wit, dry and sour and world-weary even at the start, not unlike the wine. The wine, though, Albert soon gave up on--as he poured his fourth glass, perhaps an hour after sunset, the wine had turned to swill. He considered, briefly, opening another of the bottles, but some words on the page had caught his attention instead and the glass sat beside him, neglected, for what could very well have been hours. It began to stink heavily of rotten wood in a failing stove--which reminded Albert that it had grown cold.

He looked up from the book, and toward the stove and bed, over the bottle tilting to refill his glass.

"I've been watching your career with great interest, young man," she said, and lifted the bottle to her lips.

Albert closed his lips and almost choked on nothing. He bit the inside of his cheek down to keep himself from gasping or screaming or leaning back, but turned to her and slowly focused.

Her eyes were closed as she drank, unpretentiously and in a rather masculine and crude fashion. She wore a black jacket and charcoal scarf not unlike his, and her bare hands were chalky and pale against the dark bottle. When she set it back on the table her face was just as pale, and her eyes were sharp and as terse as the portrait had presented them, but none of the humbling creases that had been drawn onto her were present now. The ribbon in her hair was a rich green, and her curls heavy but distinctly young despite her ambiguous figure. The color, again, struck Albert as exquisite, moreso now off the page.

He found her attractive, and then found himself disgusted by that. But then, he reasoned, it might well be vanity--she was, after all, of the same blood as he, and he did not feel _covetous_ as much as stirred.

"Dare I inquire as to what have you seen?" he asked, and could not hide his disbelief.

"Not much, I'm afraid," she said, tossing her head a bit. Her voice sounded as it it would someday be gravelly. "It only occurred to me to look after you met with the Kookluk bigwigs."

"So you managed to catch the end of the Grasslands conflict." Albert willed his heart to stop pounding so harshly. It began to work.

She tapped her fingers against the bottle. "A moment here, a moment there. We Tenki tend to look out for each other."

_So she had been on Caesar's shoulder. _"I see." He found that his voice was quavering a bit, which he could justify by the woman across the table being over a hundred years _dead,_ but it still frustrated him. He almost did not intend to reach for the glass of wine she'd poured for him. "So how is Caesar holding up?"

"Have you ever tasted unsweetened grape juice that isn't quite wine yet?" she said, and her smile was barely a hitch in the corner of her thin, pale lips.

"Ah," Albert said, comprehending. He put out the dryness in his throat with a sip of the wine--it occurred to him only after he'd swallowed that whatever it was had not gone to vinegar, like what he'd poured himself.

When Elenor spoke, she tapped her fingers in arpeggios against the bottle's face. Her nails were short and worn and rather black at the edges. "But I daresay, you're going to bring more to the family name than he will."

"He doesn't mean to 'go into' the art of war, if that is what you're implying." _Am I drunk?_

"True," she said, "but it wasn't. He's going to go far, in more ways than one. He'll get halfway around the world. I still think you're going to lap him with just your arms," she concluded, and drank straight from the bottle again, tilting her head back. Albert saw that her neck was streaked with raw pink scars as she stretched, as if from a slave-collar.

"Kindly refrain from catapulting destiny at me," he said, to mask his curiosity and disgust.

She gasped a little when she stopped drinking, as if the air mattered to her, and the scarf rose to blanket whatever Albert had seen. "Don't want your life to be the result of years of prophecy?"

"Astute."

"Consider it the estimation of a wayward ancestor, then."

Albert chuckled, despite himself, and raised the once-again-sweet glass to drink. "What was it, a wager with some other dead Silverberg?"

"Enough about me, young man." She leaned her elbows on the table and her breasts over them, and Albert peered down over the rim of his goblet at the lapel of her jacket. "I'm here to talk about _you._"

He held his glass just under his lips and looked her in the eyes. "What's a nice boy like me doing in a place like this?" he asked, eyebrows raised and startled at how comfortable he was. It was about now he surmised that he was probably hallucinating.

"In your own words, 'getting me drunk and robbing me blind,'" she said, if anything leaning a little closer as she smirked. "Paying your respects to me even as you appropriate my knowledge toward amoral ends," she said, retreating into her chair--when had there been a second chair here?--with a more serious expression. "Once you conceded that war to your brother, you entered the top tier, boy. I suspect you know that, if you're here."

"And I've passed the point of no return, I know." He set his glass down and watched the wine drip down its edges in smooth towers.

"Incorrect." Perhaps her voice was _already_ gravelly and old, and wouldn't just someday get there. "You _will,_ the moment you leave this island."

_Yuber,_ Albert thought, rather clearly. He reached his mind for the Demon, testing the harsh and gnawing bond that had begun to form between them during the war, and (as he suspected) pain careened through his sinuses. "...What's the Demon done?"

"Enough," Elenor said. When Albert opened his eyes again, he saw her smiling, rolling the bottle's edge along the desk. He caught the words _expeditious retreat_ on the page he'd left open in front of him.

"...You don't mean to keep me here."

"I mean to make you aware of a few things should you decide to take the road of least resistance," she said, eyes glimmering in the lantern's meager light.

"You don't actually expect me to take the road of least resistance."

"No, but someone had to at least offer it to you."

_And it has to be a woman over a century dead,_ Albert thought, and drowned the thought with another sip of wine. "An exercise in futility, then."

"I'm dead," she said almost pedantically, leaning forward on her elbow again. "I'm no stranger to futility." A few of her curls and a trail of the green ribbon slid over her shoulder then, and when Albert noticed that the ghost had some curve to her. It startled him in a way that he decided to dismiss with another drawl of the wine.

"You're no stranger to the road of least resistance either," he said, and set down his glass, which was close to empty.

She smirked at him. "You skimmed those particular journals."

"I thought them irrelevant."

"They won't be if you don't skim them next time." With a bit of a scoff, she let the bottle in her hand tilt until it rested against the rim of Albert's glass with a faint _clink._ "You came here to see what I had done so that you could undo it."

"No."

"_Yes._"

"Yes," Albert admitted.

"You want an exercise in futility?" She deepened her smirk--_but where are her wrinkles?_, Albert thought--and poured him more wine. "Lie to a ghost."

The wine, when he drank it this time, wasn't just "not swill". It caught in his throat, sweet as if freshly uncorked, wood-scented and rich. He opened his eyes and the apparition was leaning back in her capricious chair again, the bottle in her lap and its neck crossed in her arms. _Apparition,_ he remembered, and let his eyes drift over her and what made her not real. He found staggeringly little. He tried to regulate his breathing, tried not to stare at her, tried not to let the confusion show, then realized how pointless any kind of concealment was.

"I united these Islands," she said, eyes vindictive and voice a hoarse whisper. "I came here to hide from most of the things you're miring yourself in and ended up a dead hero. A few falling rocks and bam, some kid's cause has its martyr."

"I won't be a martyr," Albert protested, and felt like a child.

Elenor smirked. "No, that's not the Chikai way." She raised the bottle, toasting something Albert could neither see nor discern, and said as if to quote, "Stars of Heaven fall, Stars of Earth break it." With the bottle aloft, she turned her eyes back down on Albert. "Chikai like you break the long falls of us Tenki with an upended spike through the chest."

_Does she speak of Mathiu?_ Albert masked his shiver with a roll of his eyes. "That would amuse Grandfather."

"I'll tell him in a decade or so."

"I should write him," Albert mused. Only after those words did he realize that Elenor implied that Grandfather had only that long left to _live._

"You should do a lot of things," she said.

"Such as?"

"Tell him you came here," she demanded, her elbows propped on the table and hands clasped. She'd set the bottle off to her side and should have had a reflection in it, but Albert could see the hearth and the portraits on it through the bottle. "Send him my crest. You're going to leave this island; it's going to stop being sacred enough to keep your enemies from pillaging it."

Leaning a touch forward himself, Albert found himself asking, "Do you care?"

"That you plan on grinding my bones to make your bread," she half-clarified.

"Yes."

"No," she lied.

"_Yes._"

"I knew I liked you." Elenor tapped the tips of her fingers together in an arpeggio from pinky to thumb, and her black-edged, dirty nails were nocked. _As if gardening,_ Albert guessed, then thought more morbidly of it and retreated into his chair, the wine glass hovering on his lower lip.

Over the rim of the glass, he set his eyes on hers, and said as clearly as he could contrive, "I want to dissociate our family from that damnable contract with that damnable creature--which is of course among the reasons you fled--and if I want something done correctly, I will do it myself."

As he drank deeply, he could hear her in his sinuses. "...I knew I liked you," she said, in barely a whisper.

When he'd drained the glass, he set it down on the desk again. "When your brother was killed, Harmonia confiscated Julian's book. It took until my Grandfather's time to get it back."

"So you fancy you're making up for lost time?" she asked.

"I 'fancy' nothing but propriety."

"You 'fancy' that what you're doing is within the bounds of propriety."

"It is proper," he said, a touch more forceful than he would have to an ally, "to fulfill my contractual and filial obligations."

She mused, "You sound like my father." The bottle was in her hands again, teetering uncertainly from left to right.

"You sound as if I shouldn't be glad of that."

With a shrug, she raised her eyebrows and taunted, "I'm just a restless spirit. Who am I to tell you what you should and shouldn't feel?"

Albert nearly laughed. "In the unlikely case that my presence here did not make this trait obvious, I tend to value the endorsement of restless spirits."

"Don't tell me you came here for my blessing." He reasoned that, when she rolled her eyes, he looked much the same, save the beautiful hair she tossed over her shoulder without so much as a gesture.

"I came here for your knowledge. I wasn't expecting more than your journals and perhaps some experiential osmosis."

"You're wearing a Pale Gate Rune between your eyes. You should be used to drawing strange things out of the ground."

With a nod at the bottle of wine, its new and pungent smell drifting toward him, he said, "I would have credited the libation more than anything else, actually."

She shrugged. "It was a lot of little things."

_The man on the shore._ Albert remembered. "I'm sure you have your reasons."

"It's like any other ghost story, young man. I'm here to lay down some caution."

Albert wondered how she could be so casual about the fact that she was dead while he had to keep reminding himself that the woman before him was not alive, and probably less polished-looking if any of her remained. "I've already gotten over the seasickness," he said.

"Good." She coughed, or laughed, into the cuff of her jacket. "That was the first step.

"And the next?"

She leaned clear across the table, so close to him that he could see his face in her shining eyes. She _whispered,_ and he felt it on his lips, "Don't ever waste good wine on the dead."

He could taste the blood dripping down his throat.

Albert flew backward. He spat and his back toppled the chair. Sunlight flashed into his eyes and something caught him, then flung him forward onto the table. The bottle and journal and glass were thrown to the floor and Albert's face planted in a putrid spill of the vinegar the wine had become overnight. He scrambled to his feet and fumbled for the knife in his pocket, the acid and foul-smelling liquid dripping down his cheek.

"Yuber--"

"I thought you'd killed yourself," the Demon said, brushing his gloves off and tossing the chair aside

Albert kept the knife out but tried to still his heaving chest, slowing his panicked breath. "Hardly." He glanced at the desk, and beyond it. He saw only one glass, the wine aerating in the morning chill where it had spilled, the deep green bottle--the color Elenor's ribbon had been, he now noticed--still rolling. And Yuber stood between him and the bookcase, in the slightly blood-enriched black sweater he'd taken to wearing at sea, golden braid hanging and face inscrutable. "I don't suppose you came back to stop me."

"I wanted to gloat," Yuber rasped, with a barely discernible shrug.

"Thought as much." Albert realized that the inside of his cheek was bleeding. Perhaps he had bitten it too hard in his sleep--if that had been sleep. "We have to clear the island, but then we're done here."

"Good." The Demon started to walk, kicking aside the chair--_like the ferryman's head,_ Albert remembered.

Albert held out the hand with the knife in it, but kept his palm mostly open. "Take some of the books."

Yuber glared.

"The faster they're gathered, the faster we leave," Albert said. His breathing had more or less subdued and the wine--vinegar--on his cheek had evaporated, leaving his skin tingling between the short, prickly little hairs that had surfaced in the night. He put the knife back in his pocket and glanced back at the lolling bottle on the floor, still dripping the vile liquid.

Yuber turned aside and sighed, rolling his mismatched eyes and turning back the way he came. He pried the lid off the nearest crate with his heel, then knelt and pushed aside the bottles of wine in it. He reached up and grabbed some books from the lowest shelf and piled them in.

Albert moved to straighten up the spill and gather the journals that had scattered when he'd been flung back into the desk. Once he'd dried the journals off and stacked them--there had only been one chair, he realized--he brought the bottle up to the shelf above the hearth. Elenor's portrait leered back at him, daring charcoal eyes and bold shading.

He set the bottle down in its place and began to remove her picture from the frame. It found a temporary home in the folds of his coat, and a more permanent one in his own island manor, when he built it half a century later.

* * *


End file.
